Assange to hear Supreme Court verdict next week

Summary:The UK Supreme Court is to hand down a ruling on Wednesday on whether Wikileaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to Sweden, the court has said.The ruling will decide whether Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny had the authority to issue a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) for Assange's extradition.

If the court decides that Ny was not a judicial authority for the purposes of an EAW, the Crown Prosecution Service will drop extradition proceedings.

If the ruling does not go Assange's way, it could be a step in the process of Assange being extradited. An adverse ruling may not result in Assange's immediate extradition. If the court decides against Assange on Wednesday, his legal team could immediately apply to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg for an appeal. Assange would not be extradited while that application and appeal process continued.

Assange has been on conditional bail since 2010, and has been obliged to spend most of his time confined to the Ellingham Hall estate in Suffolk.

Tom is a technology reporter for ZDNet.com, writing about all manner of security and open-source issues.Tom had various jobs after leaving university, including working for a company that hired out computers as props for films and television, and a role turning the entire back catalogue of a publisher into e-books.Tom eventually found tha...
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